Thursday, 30 August 2018

Vacating the field

News that Frank Field has resigned the Labour whip should give Labour pause for thought. I've heard Field described as a socialist a non-socialist could vote for. I completely agree. That he is a Brexiter is nether here nor there. He has a track record as a dedicated constituency MP and a thinker.

Field won the respect of (c)onservatives during the Blair era when he came out against the rampant welfarism that had taken root. This was a man who had studied the root causes of poverty and had a genuinely devotion to tackling it. His proposals, though, did not get very far. They were incompatible with the Labour strategy of building a welfare client base. And this tells us all we need to know about Labour.

It tells us that Labour sees the role of the state to be a universal provider. They are not actually interested in solving poverty, rather they think the poor should have enough to get by on from the state and that will keep them voting Labour. Power for its own sake. Though Blairites are now described as centrists there is actually only one crucial difference between Blair and Corbyn. Blair thought it necessary to do those things one has to do to win elections.

At the centre of the Labour philosophy is the notion that the world is one giant conspiracy against the poor. Talk to any leftist for long enough and soon they will go off on a rant about the Rothschilds which is a veiled version of "the joos control everything". It's the politics of petulant teenagers.

These sorts of theories tend to go hand in hand with crackpot 9/11 conspiracy theories because it's born of the belief that the that somebody is in control of everything. This explains leftist politics. They think that since everything can be controlled then it should be controlled by the state. Since it can't be controlled everything goes to hell when left wing governments try it.

This sort of politics, though, has always gone hand in hand with antisemitism, and even if Corbyn wasn't an antisemite, a Labour leader subscribing to the politics of petulant teenagers will mainstream antisemitism and put antisemites closer to power. The real question, therefore, is why on earth did it take a man like Frank Field this long to resign the whip?